Whicker: Ex-volleyball player headed to SEC for football

SANTA ANA – A year ago Woody Quinn was a 6-foot-6 volleyball player who didn't have a 40-yard time, hadn't played football since the ninth grade, and wasn't particularly careful what he wished for.

On Wednesday he signed a national letter of intent to play football at Tennessee.

Not in Tennessee. At Tennessee, the University of.

The place with the 102,455-seat stadium on Peyton Manning Drive.

The team that plays Florida and Alabama and the rest of the Southeastern Conference, the Premiership of college football.

The obsessive SEC fan base that has already made Quinn more famous in Knoxville than in San Juan Capistrano.

"I'm not a huge fan of Twitter," Quinn said Wednesday. "But the day I committed to Tennessee I had 500 followers just like that. It went up to 3,000 this morning."

He was sitting with Geoff Jones, his coach at Santa Ana College in the only season of organized football that Quinn has played since 2006, his JV year at St. Margaret's..

"He's never had a full year of football training," Jones said. "Now that he's at a big-time place like that, the sky is the limit."

Tennessee courted Quinn even though he caught only 15 passes (but for 16.8 yards per) and scored one touchdown in 2012.

He also had to learn how to catch hostile helmets in his ribs.

"One time in practice, I was out looking for somebody to block and (linebacker) Marc Millan rang my bell and knocked my mouthguard out. I was on all fours and Coach was yelling, 'You gotta retaliate!'''.

"We had to coach him to be mean," Jones said. "He'd say he didn't want to finish a guy off with a block and we'd say, no, you have to practice that."

Quinn rolled with all of it. All he was doing was accommodating his yearnings.

Growing up, he saw himself as Ed McCaffrey or Shannon Sharpe, of the Broncos.

Then he missed his sophomore year because of a back injury, and volleyball's all-year demands took over.

With the legendary Karch Kiraly as a co-coach and Karch's son, Kory, as a teammate, Quinn helped the Tartars to a CIF title and got a partial ride to Pepperdine. He transferred to Cal Baptist last year.

"But it was really getting bad, me wanting to play football," he said. "I wished Cal Baptist had a team. I guess it worked out for the best that they didn't."

Meanwhile, Jones heard from an ex-coach of his, Mark Dye, who knew about Quinn.

In March, Jones took former Santa Ana QB Andrew McDonald and Quinn to a workout at Newport Harbor.

"In a hurricane," Jones said. "The rain was coming sideways. I called it off four times. But they kept going, and Woody caught everything. I wanted to see if the football would stick to him."

"And I got to work with a high-level quarterback," Quinn said. "Andrew was zinging it and I wasn't wearing gloves. My hands were all red and torn-up. That gave me an idea what to expect."

Smiling and shaking his head, over all this, was Woody's father, Tim.

He played water polo for Ted Newland at UC Irvine and was on Team USA from 1974-79.

He wanted Woody to sample the camaraderie and the life lessons of a team sport. Within reason, that is.

"I thought, well, he could go play at Pomona in Division III and have a great experience," Tim said. "From what people are telling me about Tennessee, this is very different. But if hard work means anything, Woody will have a chance."

"Tennessee is different," Woody said, smiling. "They've got a big weight room and, right next to it, a nutrition shop. You have a snack pack all fixed up for you. And they have two locker rooms. At Cal Baptist we shared the locker room with the basketball team. Usually I just changed in my apartment."

The unsung hero in all this is Josh Conklin. He was Tennessee's recruiter. He also knew Volunteers coach Derek Dooley was in the process of getting fired. Yet he still pursued Quinn and, when the inevitable happened, Conklin left Quinn's name with the new UT staff, headed by Butch Jones.

"He recruited me even though he knew he'd only have a job two more days," Quinn said. "That was the most true form of recruiting, solely for the player."

Conklin landed at Florida International as the defensive coordinator. Quinn will be landing in a land hostile even to the hopes of some Parade All-Americans.

"It's been a cool path," he said.

He has two more years to walk it, and, in his life, time has a tendency to run away.

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